


A Love Song (The Way It's Meant to Be)

by msermesth



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Angst, Avengers Vol. 5 (2013), Break Up, Iron Man: Director of SHIELD, M/M, Time Gem (Marvel), Time Travel, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-23 02:07:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17071451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msermesth/pseuds/msermesth
Summary: “I can’t do this anymore, Steve. I just… can’t.”Steve hears the words out of Tony’s mouth, but he doesn’t understand them, doesn’t recognize what they mean when strung together in a sentence. Tony’s staring straight ahead, watching him, stoic and unmoving, and he’s ready for a battle he doesn’t want.“What can’t you do?” Steve asks and the words catch in his throat because he knows when Tony isn’t going to back down.“I can’t be with you.”





	A Love Song (The Way It's Meant to Be)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Missy_dee811](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy_dee811/gifts).



> Set during the beginning of Hickman's run (post New Avengers #3, pre Avengers #1). 
> 
> I attempted to fulfill all four requests at once- 1. Tony regains his memories of Civil War, 2. Steve uses the Time Gem during the Incursions, 3. Breakup, 4. Crying

“I can’t do this anymore, Steve. I just… _can’t_.”

Steve hears the words out of Tony’s mouth, but he doesn’t understand them, doesn’t recognize what they mean when strung together in a sentence. Tony’s staring straight ahead, watching him, stoic and unmoving, and he’s ready for a battle he doesn’t want.

“What can’t you do?” Steve asks and the words catch in his throat because he knows when Tony isn’t going to back down.

“I can’t be with you.” Tony has the gall to say it through tears, as if he isn’t the one responsible for destroying one of The Last Good Things. “I can’t be in this relationship. It isn’t working.” He takes a step back and refuses to meet Steve’s eyes. Steve recognizes the sort of stand-off because it’s been like this before, it feels like it’s always been this way between them, and Steve can barely remember yesterday when all he could think was ‘I love this man’.

“I’m sorry.”

Steve stays rooted in the spot, ignoring the impulse to go to Tony and shake the answers out of him. “Why?” There’s nothing that would satisfy him, but he needs to see Tony try to say something that comes close.

Tony swallows, and Steve knows for certain whatever he’s going to say will be a lie. “I told you. This relationship isn’t working for me anymore.”

Of all the things Steve could have heard, that may be the worst. “So it wasn’t working for you this morning when I brought you coffee in bed? How about last night when I fucked you into oblivion?”

“Steve, I--” Tony begins to say, but he falls silent, his excuses useless. He wipes tears away with the heel of his hand instead.

A thought pops into Steve’s brain, small but loud, and it explains everything. “Was it something I did?” he asks, because he needs to know. If he knows, he can fix it.

Tony’s eyes go wide and his mouth drops open. “No! Never. I promise.”

Steve doesn’t believe him, not when Tony’s using that voice. “You can’t possibly mean that.”

“I do,” Tony responds in the smallest voice Steve knows he has. He wraps his arms around himself, and he looks small, too. “I never meant to hurt you. I need you to know that.”

Steve breaks, then and there, in the kitchen of the penthouse apartment they share, in the home they’ve be building. “Sure doesn’t feel that way.”

“I’m sorry,” Tony says, quiet and to his feet. “I really am.”

Steve’s heart thumps, he can hear it in the silence that follows. His hands are held in tight fists, his fingernails dig into his palm, the world is falling apart beside him. He stands his ground and refuses to be the one who leaves the room first even though he has nothing left to say.

It doesn’t matter. Tony’s the one who always leaves.

He steps out past the kitchen island and down the hallway. The sound of the front door closing echoes all the way to Steve’s ears.

Their apartment has never felt so empty.

Tears burn at the edge of Steve’s vision and one falls down the curve of his cheek. He uses the back of his hand to wipe it away, bites the bottom of his lip in order to gain some sort of control over the tightness gripping his chest. He’s torn between never leaving the tile he’s standing on and never coming back here again.

Orange lights dot his vision for a few moments and for a few seconds it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a thing that’s happening irrespective to everything else, but he can only pretend for so long that that’s the case because the glow is rising and burning brighter. It looks like the whole kitchen, with its stainless steel appliances and glossy subway tile, is burning up. It looks like how Steve feels.

The Time Gem floats before him. Steve should be surprised, but he mostly feels disappointment to discover they were never destroyed at all. The scenario hints at betrayal, but he doesn’t think too much of it as he reaches out and grabs it close.

The room goes burning hot white and a force emitting from the Time Gem flings Steve back. He hits the wall so hard it cracks behind him, kicking up plaster dust and paint chips that fall around him like snow. It takes a full minute to settle, and Steve needs every bit of it to gain his footing. He brushes off the debris and steps forward and is only certain of one thing--he’s not anywhere he’s supposed to be.

“What the…?” he mutters to himself. The space around him is familiar like a ghost, he’s staring at the old Avengers headquarters in the penthouse of the tower, back when Tony and he had formed the new team before the SHRA. The decor is subtly dated--there’s too much leather and track lighting--and the paintings of past teams on the walls that show every iteration of their costumes stop conspicuously a year ago. The wall behind him has been smashed, but the rest of it looks pristine and barely touched, nothing like how it did when the Avengers were here.

“This isn’t fucking real,” whispers a small voice behind Steve.

Steve turns around to see exactly who he expects. Tony’s in a dress shirt with his tie loose around his neck and his sharp patterned socks bright against the dark grey of his suit pants. Despite being immaculately groomed, he’s still never seemed to be so much of a wreck. It’s the bags under his red eyes that betray the nights he hasn't slept and Steve hates that he has any context for how close this is to Tony’s rock bottom.

“It’s me,” Steve says. There isn’t a calendar on the wall or a copy of today’s paper, but based by haunted look in Tony’s eyes, he knows where he is and when he is, which means whatever he’s going to tell Tony won’t be believed.

“No, it’s not.” Tony counters. “You’re dead.” He rubs his eyes, like it’s any way to make the very real Steve in front of him disappear. “Fuck, I thought I was done with these fucking hallucinations.”

Steve grits his teeth. Tony had once told him about these Extremis-induced hallucinations while they had been laying in the safety of their bed. Steve had held him close while he listened to the perverted way Tony’s brain found to haunt him. Steve wants to do that now, but he can’t. He’s powerless, at the mercy of time and circumstance and the whim of an infinity gem.

Tony takes a step further but doesn’t call for the suit or make any other effort to defend himself. “Say something,” he begs Steve, his eyes wet with tears that fall on his splotchy red cheeks. “Tell me what I need to know so you’ll go away.”

Steve could fill the tower with all the things he wishes Tony knew. “I love you.” He lays his hand gently on Tony’s wet cheek. “That’s what I need you to know.”

“Fuck it,” Tony swears as he steps out of Steve’s reach. “I don’t need this right now.”

“No, you don’t,” Steve says to himself, because this will destroy Tony, break him down into all component parts, and he’ll have to rebuild himself from scratch because of it. The things the man in front of him is going to do to forget the life he’s stuck in twist in Steve’s guts. “You don’t want to know any of what’s coming.”

There was a time, back when the bars of a jail cell separated the two of them and Tony couldn’t even deign to look at Steve without his mask, that Steve could almost… appreciate the pain Tony is going through. He would have never delighted in it, it would have _killed_ him, but the idea that there was a limit to Tony’s hubris, well, Steve was only human.

Steve knows the other side of anger now, knows what it’s like to hold Tony in his arms and to feel his skin against his. Tony doesn’t deserve the future he’s hurtling towards; he doesn’t deserve the Skrulls, or Osborn, or losing his memory--

“Make a copy,” Steve says quickly before he can convince himself that the possible ramification in time are more important.

Tony looks at him, wide-eyed, and Steve can see the recognition of in his eyes. He’s already been thinking about the database of superhero identities he has stored in his brain and what a liability it will probably shape up to be, which means he’s already accepted that the quickest way to destroy that liability is to wipe his own brain.

Which also means Tony’s prepared to give himself the gift of forgetting if he needs to. He’s going to need to.

“Make a copy of your brain. Put it somewhere no one will ever find it. It’s too valuable to lose,” Steve pleads because he never wants to relive the moment Tony woke up and looked at him like the last couple of years had never happened.

Tony scowls and counters, “That’s an awful idea.” He rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes, some misguided attempt to make Steve disappear.

“Do it. _Please_.” Steve would get on both knees if he thought it would make any difference.

“Why the hell would I--” Tony stops his question when an orange glow begins to permeate the room, taking up the space in between them.

It’s time to go back to the future where Tony hates him and nothing’s different. Steve grips the time gem hard and silently begs for a few more minutes, but Tony just fades to white along with everything else, ripped away from Steve by time and circumstance.

He lands heavy on his back against the kitchen tile amongst the ruins of their home and his life.

 

\--------------

 

The smell of coffee wafts from the mug as Tony enters the workshop, the heat of the ceramic encourages him to hold it closer, tighter. He had started the day in Steve’s arms and plans on ending it that way; but in the meantime the universe is collapsing and Tony has work to do.

Or he does until a notification icon comes on in the corner of Tony’s home screen.

It’s strange, he hasn’t been expecting anything like this, and the wrongness of it sets off alarms far stronger than what he should expect. “Shut down the lab and close off network access,” he commands the computer systems. If it’s a virus, he needs to limit the chances that anyone else will be exposed.

Curiosity drives him to click the notification icon and wait patiently while the icon expands to reveal an Iron Man gauntlet, open wide to reveal a replusor in the center which glows, pulsating in a way that imitates a loading screen.

Tony’s about to give up waiting when the repulsor stops glowing and the screen goes all black and words begin to appear, letter by letter.

>>Tony, first things first. I’m you.

>>Everything that follows might come as a surprise, but I had to do it this way.

>>If everything went according to plan, you won’t remember me doing it, though. And for that, I’m sorry.

>>A few days ago I experienced an Extremis-induced hallucination which encouraged me to make a copy of my own memories.

>>They are available for download. Warning: content is extremely disturbing.

>>Download y/n?

Tony’s finger hovers above the y button for a second. Warning bells ring out in his head, he should shut the whole thing down, run away as fast as he can. This has to be a plot of someone like the Mandarin, it’s just too perfect of a set up, but Tony can’t let go of the thought that only, he, himself, would try to weasel into his brain on the promise of upsetting memories.

His gaze shifts upwards, through the concrete and floorboards and everything else separating the workshop from the penthouse, and Steve, probably sitting in the kitchen and reading the Sunday paper. There are things he knows in his past that he never wanted to think about again, and he’s seen the pictures of that period of his life to prove it. There are things from that time he can’t even explain to himself.

There are things he’s doing now he can barely explain to himself. Things that keep him up at night.

Tony presses y.

>>I’m sorry.

For a few minutes nothing happens; time ticks by as it always has, the perfect silence of the workshop’s climate control system only punctuated by the blood he hears rushing past his ears.

And then, everything happens.

Images flood his mind, but they come with thoughts stranger and more detailed than the movies playing before his eyes.

Manhattan lies in rubble, and Tony’s on his back staring at Steve and the shield raised above his head, and this is how he’s going to die--on the concrete, with the words _do it, Steve_ , on his lips and the world watching from the sidelines.

Jan’s gone. His tech has broken down and taken the earth’s information systems with it, and _god_ , it was Jessica all along, why didn’t he see that, and why didn’t he see the vulnerabilities in everything he’s built?

Hospital monitors tick around him, creating discordant noise that amplifies under its own weight as Tony uses Extremis from far away to combine with the machines keeping Happy alive. He thinks he must be the worst person alive because he can’t even look at Happy as he kills him.

Steve’s about to die because Tony couldn’t keep his armor under control. Yinsen’s son, of all people, wants to prove a point and he’s going to do it with fucking Captain America’s life. It’s Tony’s fault, it’s always been his fault, and he’d give up his life it meant he could fix any of it.

Pepper’s barely breathing in front of him, and he can’t lose her, when he’s already lost so much.

Tony had been prepared for the worst when he agreed to support the SHRA, but nothing could have prepared to him for what it’s like to sit next to Steve’s bloody, dirty, _lifeless_ , body.

He did this. He did all of this.

Tony pushes himself back from the desk and stumbles onto the floor. His head crashes into a steel workbench behind him, pain expands from the point of contact, hot and disorienting. Tony closes his eyes and reminds himself he hasn't learned a single new thing.

It doesn’t matter. Knowing something happened is worlds away from feeling something happen and Tony can’t stop fucking feeling. Again, his attention is pulled upward to where he imagines Steve making their bed and tidying up their room.

“No,” he sobs because he’s never going to be able to look Steve in the eye without remembering what he looked like with bullet holes in his chest and stomach. He thinks of the incursions and the Illuminati and wants to vomit.

Tony gets to his feet and manages to take a few steps to the door. They’re difficult steps, each one heavier as it gets clearer and clearer to him what he has to do. The elevator ride up takes forever, Tony thinks about pressing the emergency stop five different times, but he does what he’s always done, and doesn’t stop himself. One final act in in his saga, one more thing to be his fault.

Steve’s in the kitchen, not the bedroom, and Tony regrets he doesn’t have the couple hundred more feet to separate himself from his own demise. “Tony?” Steve asks, when he sees him, and wow, he’s perfect like this--freshly showered and ready for the day--and Tony would do anything, _anything_ , if it meant he could just transport himself back until this morning.

“I have something to say.” Tony says it with conviction he desperately doesn’t want to feel. Somewhere in the back of his head he’s calculating distances to the Long Island mansion. He’s certainly not going to sleep here ever again.

Steve's eyes scrunch in a way Tony used to find endearing. “Ok…”

Tony would do anything to protect him, and that’s why, even if his voice wobbles, he says, “I can’t do this, anymore Steve. I just...   _can’t_.”

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays, Dora!


End file.
